The final push for 19th Amendment
One vote needed: Suffragists saw Tennessee as their last hope, worst nightmare
“Save the South,” they cried. “A woman’s place is in the home,” they insisted.
Suffrage is a “fatal mistake,” they claimed.
It will put the government under “petticoat rule,” they warned.
One hundred years ago, as a groundswell of momentum pushed toward giving women the right to vote, the South decried the idea.
Issues of race and gender equality railed against their Southern sensibilities. As tensions mounted and personal frictions split the movement, the country turned to Tennessee to decide.
Congress approved the 19th Amendment on June 4, 1919. By the next summer, 35 of the nation’s 48 states had voted to ratify. Eight states rejected it. Three refused to weigh in.
Only two states remained undecided: North Carolina and Tennessee.
Just one needed to vote in favor to make women’s suffrage the law of the land.
Suffragists saw Tennessee as their last hope. And also their worst nightmare.
A robust and energetic suffrage movement had overtaken the state. Within it, three factions emerged. Two groups of suffragists – one more extreme than the other – sought ratification, while one vocal contingent of antis amplified the vicious opposition.
The separate sanctions mirrored national sympathies for and against the vote. And with the entire country’s fate in the balance, only one of them would emerge victorious.
During the sweltering summer of 1920, the nation watched as Tennessee state legislators gathered on Nashville’s Capitol Hill and an epic battle for women’s rights ensued.
“We were literally the only state left,” Davidson County historian Carole Bucy said. “It was down to us.”
‘Remember the ladies’
The fight for suffrage didn’t surface overnight. It was, in fact, as old as the country itself.
In the days of the American Revolution, Abigail Adams wrote her husband, John Adams, at the Continental Congress.
There, men elected to the Colonial delegations framed the laws of a new nation.
“If particular care and attention is not paid to the ladies,” Abigail Adams wrote, “we are determined to foment a rebellion, and will not hold ourselves bound by any laws in which we have no voice or representation.”
Her admonishment did no good. Decades upon decades later, organized work for women’s suffrage began in earnest.
In Seneca Falls, New York – at the Wesleyan Chapel on a mid-July day in 1848 – Elizabeth Cady Stanton first called for women to have the vote.
Four years later, another convention followed. There, Susan B. Anthony assumed leadership of the cause to which she devoted her life. She founded the National Woman Suffrage Association and, in 1875, drafted the amendment that would bear her name.
But competing priorities about who should get the vote first – black men or, separately, white women – had split the suffrage movement. And now many feared a new law that would give not only black men but also black women a place at the polls.
Anthony’s amendment sat in limbo, trapped in Congress, for more than 40 years.
Getting aggressive
The decadeslong fight was enough to make tempers flare. Suffragists were tired of asking politely and tired of waiting. What began as the 16th Amendment became the 17th. As more time passed without ratification, the 18th. And, finally, amendment No. 19.
When a new generation of women suffragists arose, they took a new tack.
“It was more aggressive and confrontational,” said Elaine Weiss, acclaimed author of “The Women’s Hour,” which recounts Tennessee’s critical role in the movement. “They said: ‘We are not going to ask, we’re going to demand. We are going to offend people. We don’t care about being ladylike.’ “
With the assertion, two separate – but equal – pro-suffrage women’s parties took root to lead ratification campaigns. Carrie Chapman Catt led the National American Woman Suffrage Association. Alice Paul oversaw the more aggressive National Woman’s Party.
Each mounted a full-fledged fight for voting equality.
Suffrage banners transformed streetscapes into colorful reflections of women’s empowerment. Demonstrators picketed at the White House with signs in their hands. And, on New Year’s Day 1919, women lit watchfires, burning copies of speeches about democracy and self-government made by President Woodrow Wilson.
The women were inflamed, and Wilson, who had been slow to warm to suffrage, took notice.
Finally, after 41 years of debate, the U.S. Senate approved 56-25 a constitutional amendment for women’s suffrage. Vice President Thomas Marshall, flanked by suffragists, signed the Susan B. Anthony Amendment, and as 1919 came to an end, 22 states had given support.
But it wasn’t that simple.
By March 1920, as the number of states voting to ratify went from 33 to 35 with the addition of West Virginia and Washington, momentum stalled and the outlook began to again look bleak.
Six states, all but one Southern, had rejected suffrage. In June, Delaware said no. In July, so did Louisiana.
North Carolina and Tennessee were the final hopes.
“The suffragists know if they don’t get the right to vote now they might not get it in their lifetime,” Weiss said. “And they are right to be really, really worried.
“So when it ends up in Tennessee, no one is happy – except the Tennessee suffragists who see this could be their moment of glory.”
Sanctity of women under attack
Those at the forefront of the movement in Tennessee – Anne Dallas Dudley in Nashville, Lizzie Crozier French in Knoxville, Abby Crawford Milton in Chattanooga and Sue Shelton White in Jackson – knew nothing would be easy.
Many Tennessee residents and those of the neighboring states thought the plea for women’s full suffrage attacked the Southern way of life and the sanctity of a woman’s place in the home.
Tennessee doctor A.A. Lyon published a brochure in 1915 that expressed his concern that the women’s vote would disturb harmony of families, promote divorces and multiply the number of old bachelors and old maids.
He complained about the women from out West coming to the South to promote the vote, with “their split skirts, breeches, top boots, cross saddles, and straddle riders.”
But, in truth, women’s role in the home was more of a red herring.
“The No. 1 reason the South was not going to touch suffrage was race,” Bucy said. “The position of the woman was relatively inconsequential.”
Limited suffrage, limited success
The 19th Amendment wasn’t the only path forward. Each individual state also held the power to grant the vote. As such, suffragists also waged a state-bystate campaign.
Beginning with Wyoming in 1890 and then Colorado in 1893, slowly states took matters into their own hands.
By 1919 – before the ratification of the amendment – more than a dozen states had given women the right to vote in every election and another dozen had opted to permit presidential suffrage.
Most were Western states, where fewer women made up the population and suffrage was seen as less consequential.
Tennessee had never even tried to have a referendum, but as the national push for suffrage put pressure on the state, legislatures reconsidered.
What had, for a long time, been a matter of justice, fair play and voting rights had also become a matter of pride for Tennessee women.
“Why do Tennessee men not allow their women to vote?” asked a bulletin written by the Tennessee Woman Suffrage Association and published in an April 1919 edition of The Tennessean newspaper. “Do they really think less of their women than do the men of other states? ... Are we really less intelligent, less bright, less important, less to be trusted than are other women?”
In hopes of tapping down the local suffrage movement’s incendiary commentary – and avoiding setting the stage for a national fight – Tennessee did grant women limited voting rights.
“They said, ‘You don’t need a federal amendment,’ “Weiss recounted. “‘We the sages – the men of Tennessee – will allow you to vote. But not in all elections.’ “
In the spring of 1919, women in Tennessee were given the power to vote in municipal elections, including those for mayor and city council. Still, women could not cast a ballot for their governor, state representatives, congressman or senator.
“They cut out the middle layer so important for daily life – and that is who really represents you,” Weiss said. “They cut out the positions who have the most power.”
The currents of history
That is what set the stage for the summer of 1920.
It was a time in history when movies were silent and the country was dry. The United States had just come out of the catastrophic World War I, a bloody conflict of immense proportions, and Tennessee now faced a recession.
Jobs from the war – chemical weapons laboratories and steel factories – were drying up. Wages were stagnant. Labor strikes surged.
And black men who served honorably in the war were returning home to find they were not to be treated as firstclass citizens. Racial tensions heightened.
Despite early unity with abolitionists and the “votes for all” rhetoric, when it came to the final push for suffrage, gender equality superseded racial equality for the movement’s upper-middle-class white leaders.
Many were willing to deny black women the vote to curry support from Southern Democrats, who did not want the role of black voters to grow.
White suffragists often avoided integrating issues of race into their campaigns. If they did speak of it, it came in the form of assurance that black women would not upend the current balance at the ballot box.
“Suffrage didn’t have to do with just women’s rights,” Weiss said. “It was affected by all the currents of history and social movements and economics and war that were coursing through the country at the time.
“No one knew how it was going to end up, and that’s what makes it such an important story.”
In the fight’s final weeks, both suffragists and anti-suffragists claimed turf at Nashville’s Hermitage Hotel, which was draped in banners and filled with bushels of roses – yellow for suffragists and red for anti-suffragists.
The battle had been longer and uglier than anyone expected, but in the end Tennessee would come through, becoming the 36th and final state needed to ratify the 19th Amendment.
The fight continues
When women won the right to vote in 1920, the world changed.
A century after that historic victory, there is a chance to reflect on that moment in time and use it to uplift women of the past and the present.
Despite the milestone, African American women and many other women of color were barred from voting for years to come. And voters’ rights remain an issue even today.
“It’s something that’s historic, but also pretty relevant,” Weiss said. “People make the connection — and they see how the story reverberates.
“Women are still fighting.”